


The Crown

by violenteer



Category: Outlast (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-10
Updated: 2017-12-10
Packaged: 2019-02-13 02:37:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12973914
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/violenteer/pseuds/violenteer
Summary: There’s anger in his heart that drifts up and out like unsettled smoke. It coils around the inmates that survive him. Toasts to the weddings that never come; writhes beneath the necklaces of coarse rope laid gently but completely around the bothered necks of women in his past. Anger and fear, blood and guts. Eddie Gluskin has seen it all in his time.





	1. Chapter 1

There’s anger in his heart that drifts up and out like unsettled smoke. It coils around the inmates that survive him. Toasts to the weddings that never come; writhes beneath the necklaces of coarse rope laid gently but completely around the bothered necks of women in his past. Anger and fear, blood and guts. Eddie Gluskin has seen it all in his time.

 

He remembers when his uncle split his mother’s wrist in two and asked her to count down from one hundred. He remembered the blood that came from between his own thighs, dripping like rain from the old farmhouse his father bought before Eddie was born. Washed and clean, that red would stain just as naturally as it would abate from pale, blue skin. His mother was a good woman. Full of strength and weakness and sweet words followed by emptiness that drifted up and out from her own heart.

 

Anne Gluskin’s emptiness coiled around Eddie, who survived his father, who survived his uncle. There was a love that broke down naturally over time. Like a corpse in the ground, and the sound of an agonized child in the middle of a field of corn. Like women that run too fast but forget their footing. Like neat, orderly nooses that don’t falter or fade from view.

 

If it all leaves like smoke, it comes back as stone. Eddie chases, and he captures. Again, and again and again and again and again. His mother whispers in his ear about perfection and the weight of the world. It settled too heavy on her shoulders. Blood running from her wrist to her delicate forearm.

 

“No one remembers your face, bitch. Your old man and his lady are dead. Who’s going to know where you went? Who’s going to fucking care?”

 

Uncle Lincoln and the bad things he would say sprouted and grew inside of Eddie’s head. He remembers whispering it back to himself. **Who do you think you are? Slower, boy. Slow down. That’s right. Not so fast. We got all day long to get this done. You don’t want to work, do you? No. And you won’t have to if you keep moving like that. Just like that. Damn. Take after your mother, don’t you? Nice and tight and** – Eddie couldn’t remember everything. Not everything, because it would cause him to unravel to the point of blindness.

 

He had to see. Out in Brook with his hands all calloused from decades of rough work and freedom pushing him forward, thumbing eagerly at the jut of his shoulder blades. If the world was truly Eddie’s, he thinks he might want it all to stop. He thinks he might want the sun to stay buried beneath the weeds and the dirt and the bedrock. Maybe it would be better if the world went out like the moon. Flicker, fade.

 

By the time he’s twenty-seven, Eddie knows there are two people in the world. The ones that are hurt and the ones that do the hurting. Women and men, men and women. He draws dresses in his spare time because he remembers his mother talking about how beautiful her dresses were as a child. They reminded her of snowflakes that shivered and sparkled into an otherworldly reality. Like crystal and ice and untouched perfection. Anne was careful when she talked with Eddie, but never careful enough to keep the longing from her voice.

 

He recreates the dresses. They are all fit for brides. Eddie meets women, too. He has dinner with them and smiles at them and thinks that they could help him. He remembers how little family he has and it consumes him. Like the flames that tore his uncle’s farm from the sky. It consumes Eddie, and so he convinces himself to have a family.

 

It isn’t hard to be touched when he knows the person for longer than an hour. And if he touches her first, he can breathe through it. They love to see him, and he loves to see them in return. The women. He always loves to be with them, in the beginning. They are beautiful and untouched and kind and giving and want the best for him. They are mothers in the making, and their lips are a soft pink he thinks of kissing without bile in his throat.

 

During the Night, Eddie can find no one so beautiful. They all flee much faster, breathe much heavier. Their footsteps beat like rabid drums. There is not one delicate woman to be seen in the entire fray.

 

“What do you do?”

 

“I… I’m an artist.”

 

It’s the usual conversation between one and another. Eddie tires of the conversation sometimes, but that’s only because he’s heard it all before. The nerves that swell and ease like great waves. Nervousness and anticipation. Quiet delight backlit by caution. Eddie can track most of it. He can, because he made a habit of tracking his own emotions. There is empty, and empty, and empty. Fear and anger. Poorly-created affection. Eddie knows he isn’t good at being affectionate.

 

His hands rip through the skin of his couch’s pillows. He strangles the animals he tries to save. Eddie has a feral sort of ember that burns him more than it brings any sort of peace.

 

The women are perfect, at first. Their perfection can be measured by their shyness and the way they keep to themselves. Eddie has to coax them into unfurling, hands on clothed skin, smile glowing from the pumpkin that tries so desperately to be a carriage instead. Eddie has seen so many examples of the true man, and he tries to make himself a carbon copy. He uses pet names and kills his annoyance and his eyes crinkle in feigned adoration. Eddie doesn’t know for sure, but he thinks he should feel something for at least one of them.

 

Underneath the mask, he thinks he should feel something beyond that draining contempt that pulls him beneath the fluorescent light of his office. Their lifeless bodies begin to harden quickly. They don’t dare move but for the growing in their stomachs, behind their eyes. Their tongues drift from behind their lips and Eddie must remember to sew her mouth shut before she starts to speak.

 

He can barely handle the staring. Anne would never stare at him. When he was younger, she would look at the brown-black slivers of dirt beneath her nails. There were so many chores on the farm. Things to be done and done again. Sometimes twice or three times a day, if Eddie was unlucky.

 

There was a song, once. A small tune that his mother would hum. It crawled its way up the notches of Eddie’s spine and kept him warm where his father’s hands never, never could. _I want a girl… just like the girl… that married… dear old…._

 

_She was a pearl… and the best girl…._

 

Eddie hummed it, like his mother, at first. He invested in a radio later on. In the eighties, it had to be. When he was young. Still young. His mother’s song, his mother’s age, but a message that would spin and spin in Eddie’s mind like a tireless mouse on its wheel. Eddie could never find what he was looking for within those lyrics and that melody until he was singing it softly, his fingers dug lovingly into the split-open middle of a dead woman.

 

 _A good old fashioned girl with a heart so true_. Eddie was stuck on that particular lyric for what felt like forever. He wanted to say he knew it was wrong, but he didn’t know what he would know was wrong. His father and uncle were ruthless, and they took what they wanted, and they killed what they could no longer stand.  Anne was killed for speaking. Eddie was taken back behind the shed, over by the watering trough, underneath the stars on a balmy summer’s night over and over for minutes that stretched into hours that stretched into days and weeks and years. He couldn’t escape it until he figured out how.

 

Take the lives that took their turns. Take the lives that took their turns, take the farm that took his youth, take the money that the government gave. Start fresh and sing and dance and speak and live and drink until the bottle was empty, then sleep in the bed above the covers with the empty dress of a woman who could be the mother of Eddie’s children. But would not be the mother of Eddie’s children.

 

I want a family. To be the father I never – I never – I never. There’s anger in Eddie’s heart that swings like pick axes. Up over his shoulders and head. Down below the ground, to the stuttering, shuddering, unsure crunch beneath his feet. Eddie is empty inside when he is finally incarcerated.

 

His nails are caked in red. He was caught in the act. His mother weaves strips of hay into a small crown that she used to place over Eddie’s head when he was three and four years old. Still happy, bubbling and bright and bouncy.

 

She weaves the crown for a year and a half, and when all is said and done, the insanity plea brings the ring of hay tucked safely above Eddie’s ears. Finally, donned with pride, Eddie is forced into solitary confinement for the first month. Time stretches and loops like bubble-gum. Up and down like the pick axe. Swirling in and out like the anger.


	2. Chapter 2

They want Eddie to know who the Walrider is. Eddie doesn’t know who the Walrider is. His hands twitch to touch a needle and thread. To make those Christmas tree, candy cane, snowflake dresses his mother would speak so highly about.

 

When Eddie is finally released, it is to the vocational block. He watches himself in the windows that act like mirrors. His hair is grown out. The undercut that was instilled in him since he was a boy has disappeared behind dark, curling hair. Eddie scrutinizes himself quickly before finding an old knife, sharpening it, and ridding himself of the frail reminder that he grows and dies as the rest of the world has grown and died before him.

 

His mother is the last casualty in his heart. Eddie cannot remember the names or the faces of his lost loves. When he’s done with them, they resemble a woman he’s looked for his entire life. Always the same, this woman. Her hair is a halo; her eyes closed in peace and praise. Her hands are clasped at the waist. She is a slip of a person. The discard that Eddie knows will forever be the outcome he finds.

 

There are no names. No beginnings or endings. Her insides are taken out by Eddie’s hands, thrown into the meat grinder he had to buy to break everything down so that no person would become suspicious.

 

And no one became suspicious for a long, long time, but now Eddie is trapped beneath the snake-like gaze of a company that seeks his insanity, bids it a good night, watches it liven and shimmer in new light. Like those fluorescent lights in Eddie’s office with the women and his mother and the knives and his children who would rattle against the cage of his mind, never allowed the day’s grace.

 

I want a family. A legacy. To be the father I never had. When Eddie is quiet enough, he can convince himself there was never a father. The fingerprints burned into his bony hips were those of stranger’s. Eddie was stronger. Anne was stronger. The pain never existed. Anne didn’t have to be strong. Eddie is strong, but not because of his father. No, not his father, but his mother, who didn’t have to be strong either. It was a normal life they led before her hands were covered in plastic-shiny red and she held Eddie’s face close and whispered to him more apologies than Eddie could ever count.

 

Eddie didn’t cry when her shallow grave was dug. Eddie didn’t cry when his father told him not to look at her anymore, **boy. She didn’t save you not one day you’ve been here. She ain’t gonna save you, now. You wanna look at her some more, you’re gonna work for it. Get in that damn hole with your uncle and pick up a shovel. I’m tired of this.**

 

The vocational block became Eddie’s true home faster than he knew how to process. There were the sewing machines, the stained wood that reminded him of that apartment in Brook. Not so many people, it turns out. A gymnasium full of rope and a few offices where he takes the desks and breaks them down into a poor man’s gurney.

 

Eddie forgets himself frequently. It isn’t something he did when he was in Brook, or when he was back home with his family. There are days that leave his memory entirely. Eddie blinks, and he’s sitting beside a tired bride. He blinks again and he’s in a room that looks like snow and feels like static crackling within his veins.

 

The Walrider, again. Eddie doesn’t know who the Walrider is. But the people that surround him tell him he will, that he has to, that he shows promise and they want to see him reach his full potential. Their hands slide over his shoulders, down his back. There’s a man in the room where they ask him questions. He never changes. His eyes are so brown they’re black and his face is strangely square. He doesn’t smile when he speaks, but his voice always sounds softer than it should.

 

One day, he leaves early. Eddie forgets what happened after that one day, but it happens again. It happens again. The smug man leaves early and Eddie doesn’t remember the rest. When he blinks again, he’s back in the vocational block with his hands worked bloody into a double-stitch that suits the dress he made for his mother like nothing else ever could.

 

She is proud of him. Beneath the tremor that rides Eddie’s mask, he’s proud of himself.

 

Slowly and surely, the women he re-creates turn this pride on its head. Eddie knows that they are trying. Harder than the women did, before. Harder than those sweet, soft, small women. These women are taller and heavier and homelier. They don’t resemble women at all, sometimes. Eddie knows they are. He knows they are because he was in the sewing room not too long ago, and he saw the tableaux that is to be his own reality, soon enough.

 

A wife giving birth to the son with her hand in the doctor’s while Eddie stares on in ill-kept joy. I want a family. A legacy.

 

The Walrider is a legacy that Mount Massive keeps to themselves. Eddie doesn’t know what it is, or where it is, or how he can be ready for what he has never heard of before. When he slides the stone-sharpened knife across his woman’s bare skin, he can remember bits and pieces. He lives upside down in these moments. The lights are as they were, and the voices in Eddie’s head start to quiet.

 

He rids these women of their vulgarity, and in exchange, they give him hope for a brighter future. Eddie lives inside of a world that feels as though it has never stopped and might never stop so long as he’s around. He doesn’t know for how long this goes on.

 

The meetings, the surgery, the dresses he creates for his mother and his wife. Maybe it’s all one day. One long, long day that might eventually give way to a restful evening.

  

Eddie wants to, but he doesn’t remember. He wants a family. A legacy.

 

He wants a girl, just like the girl, that married dear old…. What does Eddie want? He looks up at the man who questions him day in and day out and opens his mouth.

 

“What? Are you going to say something for once?”

 

Eddie feels for the brown-black dirt beneath his fingernails, but all that’s ever been there is his skin. He blinks and shifts in the hard, metal chair they shoved him down onto. Beyond the door sealing this room shut, there are two men who look like people Eddie used to know when he and his mother weren’t strong and there was need to be stronger.

 

“Why am I here?” He asks, finally.

 

If someone answers, Eddie doesn’t remember.

 

Outside, snow falls. Rain falls. The wind blows leaves into the panes of glass that are breakable beneath Eddie’s large, calloused hands. He smiles because he’s excited to hear movement behind him. Another woman! The love of his life, finally. She’s come to him after every slut and every whore has disappointed him. Eddie thought he might… he thought he might go his entire life without the family he so desperately wants.

 

And he wants. He does. Eddie can feel the desire writhing beneath his skin like anger and smoke and the point of a pick axe beneath easy earth.

 

This time it’s different. He knows. Eddie knows. His mouth hangs open in mechanized glee and he must work – work – _work_ to settle his expression. Hands at his sides, knife bleeding the edge of his palm dry.

 

“We’ve met before, haven’t we?”

 

She’s alive. Eddie was so sure she’d died on the dirt floor of the farm beneath his uncle’s pig sticker of a blade. She was young and beautiful and so sad that Eddie could feel that sorrow eclipse her emptiness for a moment. Every word she said before or after ‘I’m sorry’ was driven away. Eddie thought he lost his mother, but there she was. Her eyes were wide. Eddie has seen her before. In his dreams, in his fantasies. Where Anne’s hands are warm when they run over the bare skin of his scalp and she tsks about how Eddie’s haircut makes him look too old.

 

Who was the last person to touch Eddie and mean it? He is too excited to try and recall. There’s running and talking and whimpering – Eddie loves the whimpering. It reminds him of Brook. Oh, Brook. How long has it been, now? Since… since…. Since his own reflection met feral screams, rapists on either side, the bite of needles and stinging leather binding him to a terrible device Eddie cannot name.

 

You minx. My darling. Whore! All of you, whores. Your judgment. Your little swinish eyes. Those eyes that never crinkled in happiness, never widened in panic, never slivered by the burn of shameful tears. You’re going to make me work for it, aren’t you? Eddie walks slowly. He knows the vocational block as anyone else would know the back of their soft, small hand. Eddie wants to hold that hand. His eyes roll back in his head, now.

 

Where am I? Eddie thinks he might have an answer for himself if he would just stop. For a second. This chase, where does it lead? What does it lend? He can lick at the backs of his teeth and bite the skin of his cheeks and remember when his mother’s voice broke when she got down to fifty. From one hundred to fifty. _I’m sorry, Eddie._ From one hundred to fifty. _You mean the most to me. I’m sorry._

 

Again. And again. And again. I know I’ve seen your face. Eddie has. If only he could stand still and think back far enough to the day before. Ongoing sexual trauma caused by – Eddie can’t remember what comes next.

 

His bride breathes like a frightened rabbit. She is afraid, terrified. Eddie knows. He can smell it on her. if he were to lean in a little closer – and god knows that he’s wanted to, before – he can taste her. The sweat on her skin, the blood marring her thin, dainty neck. Eddie’s mother was always desperately clean. She would wash her hair in the sink where no one would bother her, keep her clothes on and wait until everyone was asleep to rid the rest of her body its filth. Shaking hands, streaming eyes. Anne wouldn’t let Eddie see her cry. Not Eddie, not little Eddie Gluskin. Not her Edward. Anne would remain impassive. Anne would speak slowly and softly, and maybe the world would forget her, but if she could gain invisibility from the men she trusted once upon a time, it would be more than enough.

 

They go where Eddie always finds himself. When he sleeps and when he wakes, he is standing over the rusted pyre with rusted hands and anger finally laying itself to rest across his woman’s shaved skin. Her blinking eyes, her shuffling hands. The way she pleads and tries to please. Eddie is happy, here. He is at ease.

 

Almost every time, it’s easy like this. Eddie explains, the women are elated, and then he makes the cut fast. He makes the cut fast while his world watches and the day continues and his memory recedes and extends, hardened limbs and angry heart suffering to make sense of everything, and everything refusing to be made sense of in turn.


	3. Chapter 3

There was a time before this one. It could have been yesterday or last year. Eddie doesn’t look at himself in the mirror, anymore. It makes no sense to glance at the ghost of who could be. He forgets himself. The permanence of life has escaped Eddie Gluskin. When his hands are red, the reason is lost. He looks at them each time he is lucid, but their color does not change. A ruby, rusty, recriminating red that will never change remains.

 

If there was sleep, maybe Eddie would resurface. If there was respite, or resignation. The women watch him like haunted skeletons. They never change, do they? Always so fucking disappointing.

 

The Walrider wants Eddie Gluskin. The Walrider is bigger and better than Eddie Gluskin could ever be. Eddie has yet to see this thing, but he knows that it will do more than Eddie has ever done in his life, what little of it he’s been able to lead.

 

Eddie’s mother is lost. His father and his uncle are shadow men, hollow and large and overtaking. Eddie knows the doctors, now. They all have familiar faces. When he is led down the steep side of his mind’s cliff, Eddie will forget. But until then, he remembers. There has only ever been one doctor to refuse him a lasting memory.

 

Trager was there and gone, a vein in Eddie’s hand that pales and disappears. Trager might have been the most understanding doctor there was, but Eddie wouldn’t know.

 

Brook is lost to him. There have only ever been these brutish, suffocating women with their blistering faces and their horrid smells. Eddie can’t have conversation with these women. He can’t look at them without taking his knife and rewriting their features to better fit the woman who has loomed over him all along.

 

At Night, he can see her still. Eddie remains in the sewing rooms. He has given up on wedding dresses, now. Too consumed by the idea that he will never find his perfect wife. He is left only with these bad imitations. A lifetime of these bad imitations could drive any man mad, and Eddie knows he’s been so much more forgiving than the common Jim or John. He folds his hands together in unanswered prayer and closes his eyes, his tired knees hitting the old floorboards heavily. Here, gone.

 

And again. And again. And again. Eddie sometimes thinks he would like to see Dennis, once more. His old friend Dennis who could make sense of what would refuse sense all together. When Eddie’s heart is a bitter, toiling flame, he will call for Dennis.

 

It is a pity that his psychiatrist never comes.

 

Eddie forgets himself all the time, but he remembers her. She has a name, and so Eddie asks. Won’t you tell me? He asks. The woman opens her mouth, but all that leaves is that same, choked noise. Eddie waits now. He waits because the music is gone and he doesn’t see the gentle swing of the noose. He hasn’t held a dead woman’s hand in so long, and he wouldn’t know how to if given the opportunity.

 

“Your name.” He tries again.

 

“Waylon Park.”

 

It isn’t a woman’s name. Eddie should have known, but he hadn’t seen it coming, and so his mind goes a thousand miles an hour just to stall a moment later. Waylon Park. Waylon, Waylon Park. Waylon Park. Does Eddie know him? Has he met this man before? He must have, because there is a frail memory begging for attention, but Eddie doesn’t think he can focus hard enough, anymore, if he ever could in the first place.

 

Eddie and Waylon become what most would call acquaintances, and further down the line, allies. Waylon’s ankle is tended to, and his stomach is filled with old food that Eddie stored over time. Cans of peaches and chicken and pudding and gravy. Things that would not spoil for years and years and years. Eddie feeds Waylon because he finds that his appetite is very suddenly gone, after all the remembering.

 

There is a great dawn that washes over them when they are finally free. Waylon’s jaw is stuck shut by the rounded and rigid knuckles on Eddie’s left hand. His eye is swollen purple and black, and his limp is ever-present. Eddie himself is left wondering exactly where they have gone.

 

He hasn’t seen light for over a decade. Now that it’s in front of him, Eddie thinks he might not know what to do with it anymore.

 

Had he ever known?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My sister and I created a background for Eddie, one night after I initially found out about the game. I was really excited about it, but I didn't think to write it down until now.


End file.
